Mobile Video Streaming

Mobile video streaming is a natural augmentation to today’s thriving Internet video streaming service. With the rapid growth of the capability of mobile handheld devices and abundant bandwidth from high-speed wireless networks, it is expected that mobile video streaming service will soon become a lucrative business section and a thrust for technological advancement on computer and telecommunication industries. In this chapter, essential technical components for constructing mobile video streaming systems are introduced. They include the latest development on broadband wireless technology and video-capable mobile handheld devices. As many modern technologies are often driven by consumer demand, user experience and expectation are discussed from the perspective of mobile video streaming. At the end, several cutting-edge research and development breakthroughs are presented as they may change the future of mobile video streaming systems.

Mobile Vision on Movement

In the early days of photography, camera movement was a nuisance that could blur a picture. Once movement becomes measurable by micro-mechanical means, the effects can be compensated by optical, mechanical or digital technology to enhance picture quality. Alternatively movement can be quantified by processing image streams. This opens up for new functionality upon convergence of the camera and the mobile phone, for instance by ’actively extending the hand’ for remote control and interactive signage.

Design and Performance Evaluation of a Proactive Micro Mobility Protocol for Mobile Networks

This chapter introduces the Proactive Micro Mobility (PMM) Protocol for the optimization of network load. We present a novel approach to design and analyze IP micro-mobility protocols. The cellular Micro Mobility Protocol provides passive connectivity in an intra domain. The PMM Protocol optimizes miss-routed packet loss in Cellular IP under handoff conditions and during time delay. A comparison is made between the PMM Protocol and the Cellular IP showing that they offer equivalent performance in terms of higher bit rates and optimum value. A mathematical analysis shows that the PMM Protocol performs better than the Cellular IP at 1 MHz clock speed and 128 kbps down link bit rate. The simulation shows that a short route updating time is required in order to guarantee accuracy in mobile unit tracking. The optimal rate of packet loss in the PMM Protocol in a Cellular IP are analyzes route update time. The results show that no miss-routed packets are found during handoff.

Mobile and Handheld Security

Mobile and handheld devices are becoming an integral part of people’s work, life and entertainment. These lightweight pocket-sized devices offer great mobility, acceptable computation power and friendly user interfaces. As people are making business transactions and managing their online bank accounts via handheld devices, they are concerned with the security level that mobile devices and systems provide. In this chapter we will discuss whether these devices, equipped with very limited computation power compared to full-sized computers, can make equivalent security services available to users. We focus on the security designs and technologies of hardware, operating systems and applications for mobile and handheld devices.

UbiWave

Advances in ubiquitous displays and wireless communications have fueled the emergence of exciting mobile graphics applications including 3D virtual product catalogs, 3D maps, security monitoring systems and mobile games. Current trends that use cameras to capture geometry, material re?ectance and other graphics elements mean that very high resolution inputs are accessible to render extremely photorealistic scenes. However, captured graphics content can be many gigabytes in size, and must be simpli?ed before they can be used on small mobile devices, which have limited resources, such as memory, screen size and battery energy. Scaling and converting graphics content to a suitable rendering format involves running several software tools, and selecting the best resolution for target mobile device is often done by trial and error, which all takes time. Wireless errors can also affect transmitted content and aggressive compression is needed for low-bandwidth wireless networks. Most rendering algorithms are currently optimized for visual realism and speed, but are not resource or energy ef?cient on a mobile device. This chapter focuses on the improvement of rendering performance by reducing the impacts of these problems with UbiWave, an end-to-end framework to enable real time mobile access to high resolution graphics using wavelets. The framework tackles the issues including simpli?cation, transmission, and resource ef?cient rendering of graphics content on mobile device based on wavelets by utilizing 1) a Perceptual Error Metric (PoI) for automatically computing the best resolution of graphics content for a given mobile display to eliminate guesswork and save resources, 2) Unequal Error Protection (UEP) to improve the resilience to wireless errors, 3) an Energy-ef?cient Adaptive Real-time Rendering (EARR) heuristic to balance energy consumption, rendering speed and image quality and 4) an Energy-ef?cient Streaming Technique. The results facilitate a new class of mobile graphics application which can gracefully adapt the lowest acceptable rendering resolution to the wireless network conditions and the availability of resources and battery energy on mobile device adaptively.

Factors Facing Mobile Commerce Deployment in United Kingdom

This chapter discuss the challenges facing mobile commerce deployment in the United Kingdom. Although the number of mobile phone users is increasing and the technology is available for successful implementation of m-commerce, only a small number of users utilise m-commerce services. At the same time, mobile phones are becoming smarter, and most of latest phones are capable of connecting to the Internet. This chapter looks at the background of m-commerce as well as the technological development of mobile phones to their current stage. Also, technical and non technical issues which hinder the adoption of m-commerce are discussed and solutions and recommendations are given.

A User Context-Aware Advertising Framework for the Mobile Web

Context-aware advertising is one of the most critical components in the Internet ecosystem today because most WWW publisher’s revenue highly depends on the relevance of the displayed advertisement to the context of the user interaction. Existing research works in context-aware advertising mainly focus on analyzing either the content of the web page (in which it is also called contextual advertising), or the keywords of the user search. However, we have identified the limitations of these works when being extended into mobile web, which has become a major platform for users to access Internet with thanks to the new lightweight web technologies and the development of mobile devices. These mobile devices are equipped with networking capabilities and sensors that provide versatile contexts including physical environment, user internal and social community. These contexts, which are far beyond just page content and search keywords, should be well organized and utilized for online advertising to gain better user experience and reaction. In this chapter, we point out the aforementioned limitations of the existing works in context-aware advertising when being applied for mobile platforms. We also discuss the characteristics of the contexts that are available on mobile devices and clearly describe the challenges of utilizing these contexts to optimize the advertisement on mobile platforms. We then present a context-aware advertising framework that collects and integrates the user contexts to select, generate, and present advertising content. The purpose of this framework is to provide the mobile users with targeted and purposeful advertisement. Finally, we discuss the implementation aspects and one specific application of this framework and outline our future plans.

Positioning and Privacy in Location-Based Services

Location positioning by GPS has become a standard function in modern handheld device specifications. Even in indoor environments, positioning by utilizing signals from the mobile cellular network and the wireless LAN has been intensively studied. This chapter starts with some review of the state-of-the-art technologies. Positioning technologies propel the market of location-based services (LBS). They are mobile content services that provide location-related information to users. However, to enjoy these LBS services, the mobile user must explicitly expose his/her accurate location to the service provider, who might abuse such location information or even trade it to unauthorized parties. To protect privacy, traditional approaches require a trusted middleware on which user locations are anonanonymous ymized. This chapter presents two new privacy-preserving approaches without such a middleware. The first is a non-exposure location cloaking protocol where only relative distances are exchanged. The second is a protocol for nearest neighbor search with controlled location exposure.

Technologies and Systems for Web Content Adaptation

The world has witnessed the blossom of mobile commerce in the past few years. Traditional Web pages are mainly designed for desktop or notebook computers. They usually do not suit the devices well because the pages, especially the large files, cannot be properly, speedily displayed on the microbrowsers due to the limitations of mobile handheld devices: (i) small screen size, (ii) narrow network bandwidth, (iii) low memory capacity, and (iv) limited computing power and resources. Therefore, loading and visualizing large documents on handheld devices become an arduous task. Various methods are created for browsing the mobile Web efficiently and effectively. This chapter investigates some of the methods: (i) page segmentation, (ii) component ranking, and (iii) other ad hoc methods. Though each method employs a different strategy, their goals are the same: conveying the meaning of Web pages by using minimum space. The major problem of the current methods is that it is not easy to find the clear-cut components in a Web page. Other related issues such as mobile handheld devices and microbrowsers will also be discussed in this chapter.

A J2ME Mobile Application for Normal and Abnormal ECG Rhythm Analysis

Cardiovascular disease has become the world’s number one killer. The prevalence of cardiovascular disease has caused many unnecessary premature deaths and imposed substantial burden to healthcare systems. Many continuous heart monitoring systems have been proposed with the aim to issue early stage warning for a possible forthcoming heart attack by utilising advanced information and communication technologies. Nevertheless, there is still a significant gap between the usability and reliability of those systems and the requirements from medical practitioners. This chapter presents our recent development of a mobile phone based ECG real-time intelligent analysis system. By fully employing the computational power of a mobile phone, the system provides local intelligence for ECG R wave detection, PQRS signature identification and segmentation, and arrhythmia classification. Because those processing can be performed on realtime, an early status warning can be issued promptly to initiate further rescue procedures. As an application of e-commerce in healthcare, a telecaridiology system like this is of great significance to support chronic cardiovascular disease patients.